Monthly Archives: March 2010

"The Journal of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies has a new, sleek looking website for the Fall 2009 issue. The "Past Issues" are still available on the previous environment: Yale website, however, and the issues go all the way back to the spring of 2002. The journal is published twice per year, and exists in both print and online formats. Some of the features of the journal include "Bookshelf" and "Class Notes and Obituaries", available in PDF format in the past issues. The current issue, Fall 2009, has some fascinating articles, i.e. "The Problem with Plastics", which includes a list on the right side of the page of a dozen or so steps you can take to avoid toxic chemicals; "Pond Scum Prized Again as Potential Biofuel"; and "Can China Save the Amur Tiger?", which discusses the promise of "tiger recovery in the same way China committed to panda conservation 30 years ago" due to a "dramatic expansion of [tiger] habitat and population." [KMG]

In honor of World Water Day, the Laureate of the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize was announced: “Dr Rita Colwell, distinguished Professor from the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health in the U.S., has been named the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate. Dr Colwell has shown how changes in climate, adverse weather events, shifts in ocean circulation and other ecological processes can create conditions that allow infectious diseases to spread, and through that link she has led the ability to craft preemptive policies to minimise outbreaks.”

The US’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the release of the Health and Environmental Research Online (HERO) database. HERO seeks to provide access to the scientific studies used in making key regulatory decisions, including EPA’s periodic review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for six major pollutants. It is part of the open government directive to conduct business with transparency, participation and collaboration.

The publicly accessible HERO database is projected to provide an easy way to review the scientific literature behind EPA science assessments, which are used to support agency decision-making. It includes more than 300,000 scientific articles including the authors, titles, dates and abstracts. In addition, through a keyword search, anyone can see information from the articles that were used to develop specific risk assessments.

HERO includes peer-reviewed literature used by EPA to develop its Integrated Science Assessments (ISA) that feed into the NAAQS review. It also includes references and data from the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a database that supports critical agency policymaking for chemical regulation. More information on the database is available at http://www.epa.gov/hero "

ToxLearn is a multi-module online learning tool that provides an introduction to toxicology. It can be used as an ancillary curriculum to a first-level undergraduate toxicology course, and can provide users of NLM’s toxicology databases with a working knowledge of basic toxicology principles. ToxLearn modules will be made available as they are completed. Module 1 covers “Toxicology and Dose Response.”